SHRI K. J.

POLYTECHNIC,
BHARUCH
CIVIL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT
COURSE: CONSTRUCTION QUALITY CONTROL
AND MONITORING
(3360602)
A REPORT ON
TOPIC: ISO14000
Prepared By: KAYASTH DIVYA R
ER. NO.: 206450306088
 ISO 14000
INTRODUCTION
Essence of healthy life and growth lies in harmony between man and
environment.

It has been realized that we are facing serious environmental problems and
measures to solve them must be taken as soon as possible.

Industrial pollution and rapid growth in population have severely affected the
world’s natural resources.

When assessing the strategies and measures to improve environmental

performance, the large firms that are individually responsible for contributing to
pollution to great extent are often in focus.

The legal requirements are thus most often directed at larger companies at least
in the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom (Hoevenagel and Wolters,
2000; SFS, 1998:899; Pets, 2000).

Business today is not just selling a product or service to a customer. For

companies, the key goals are to become more efficient i.e. to get more output per
unit of input while earning profits and maintaining the trust of their stakeholders
(Hanson, 1996).

In this view, industries prefer voluntary and market based initiative to achieve
their environmental goals.

Along with environmental benefits, these measures are seen to bring economic
benefits, improved efficiency as well as enhanced public image (Clapp, 2001).

One of the mechanisms they Have turned to is the implementation of

Environmental Management Systems (EMS).

By properly implementing an appropriate environmental management system,

any company, large or small, can ensure that they effectively manage
environmental risks along with identifying and exploiting the opportunities which
proper environmental management can bring (GEMI, 2000); and ISO 14000 is at
the core of it.

ISO: International Organization for Standardization:

The ISO was formed in 1947, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland to develop
global technical standards for engineering and industrial parts and processes.

It is the world’s largest developer of standards. It promotes the international

harmonization and development of manufacturing, product and communications
standards.

ISO has laid down more than 11000 standards ranging from paper sizes to film
speeds and out of which about 350 are for the monitoring of such aspects like air,
water and soil.

All ISO standards are voluntary in nature. They are developed in response to
market demands that ensure widespread applicability of these standards and are
developed by technical committees

Environmental Management An environmental management system is a

structured program of continuous environmental improvement that follows
procedure drawn from the established business management practices (World
Bank Group, 1998).

It is a set of policy measures management actions, operating procedures,

documentation and record keeping with defined responsibilities and
accountability of personnel within an organization to address its environmental
issues.

An effective EMS is flexible; transparent; useful to the “practitioner”; in harmony

with mission focus; focused on continual improvement.

The World’s first EMS developed by the British Standards Institute (BSI), BS7750,
published in March 1992 was based on a two year pilot implementation program
with 230 implementing organizations, and the modified standard based upon the
feedback was published in January 1994 (Starkey, 1998).
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992 expressed the need for improved environmental performance
which formed the basis for the development of ISO14001 and then International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) was charged with creating an
internationally recognized environmental management system (Bansal and
Binger, 2002).

ISO14001 was developed in less than three years, much quicker than it usually
takes to develop an international standard mainly because it relied heavily on the
content of BS7750 as a framework (Schaltegger et al., 2003).

The international standards (series of ISO 14000) have become an integral part of
the business to make them competitive in the world market.

An organization obtaining an ISO 14001 certificate means that the organization

has voluntary established the procedures and guidelines for EMS and these have
been audited and certified by an Independent agency called a Certifying body or
Third party.

The implementation of an EMS and particularly of the ISO 14000 system is seen
as a way to demonstrate an acceptable level of environmental commitment
(World Bank Group, 1998).